Google, Yahoo Gain Share In U.S. Web Search Market

[engine]

Google Inc. has increased its share of the U.S. Web search market to 47.4 percent with a gain of 0.4 percent during December, while No. 2 ranked Yahoo Inc. also edged higher, a survey said on Monday.

Web audience measurement firm comScore Networks Inc. said No. 3-ranked Microsoft Corp.'s share slid 0.5 percent to 10.5 percent of U.S. Web searches while IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com's share dipped 0.1 percent to 5.4 percent.

Google has gained share in 16 of the last 17 months in the United States, the world's largest Internet market, according to comScore data.

Google, Yahoo Gain Share In U.S. Web Search Market [today.reuters.co.uk]

[trinorthlighting]

These numbers are fairly accurate. We rank about the same across the boards for keywords and we have seen msn referrals slide the past quarter and yahoo gain.

[Rugles]

Google looks unbeatable. They still provide the best SERPS in my opinion.

MSN was all talk, then their SERPS never improved.

[night707]

MSN is a joke ... this mad live search spider was soaking up a few hundred MB bandwidth PER DAY from our videos but did not send even 3 % of the Google traffic.

We decided to block that poor Microsoft creation ...

Yahoo is pretty much in the middle between them two. Still, Yahoo traffic looks weak.

[moltar]

How can they accurately measure 0.4 percent changes? Did they survey surfers or what? This to me seems insane.

[nzmatt]

MSN was all talk, then their SERPS never improved.

Their SERPS got worse!

[glitterball]

I can't understand why MS can't produce better SERPS than they are doing.

Surely they should be able to produce something at least as good as Yahoo.

Nobody is anywhere near Google in terms of quality and that dominance is bad for us webmasters.

[spikey]

moltar, I'd bet they have access to ISP logs. There are several companies in the competitve research space that have access to ISP logs and can give you crazy amounts of information about any website (including your competitors): what keywords drive their traffic, users demographics, where they exit to, etc. They don't give out any "identifying information" but pretty much everything else. I was shocked when I first found out about it. Now I use it a lot.

[centime]

II would be better for us all if the figures were a bit closer

That way one would have more options,

Actually, i find the SERPS of the big 3 fairly evenly usefull, especially for programming tips

[tictoc]

Yes, I have also noticed Yahoo bringing more traffic lately compared to MSN. I see some days that Yahoo does better than Google on some terms. I am not sure what happened to MSN because they were on the right track for awhile but now they have almost completely given up. Maybe there is something in the works at MS.

[Olney]

You have to remember this isn't a worldwide study, just the US.
I'm wondering what are the figures for England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. In a lot of non-English speaking countries other search engines have an edge.

[np2003]

In a lot of non-English speaking countries other search engines have an edge.

.. Not really, if you look at the top 100 of worlds most popular websites, Google search is up there for most of them, e.g. google.uk google europe, google brazil etc.

I do however, believe Baidu.com search is more popoular than Google/Yahoo some days. Their rank is 4th in the world, mostly all Chinese surfers according to Alexa.

[Receptional]

No such country:

google europe

But yes - Google's market share is more dominant in many european countries, often with Yahoo in third.

[centime]

who is second then?

[unreviewed]

>>Google Inc. has increased its share of the U.S. Web search market to 47.4 percent with a gain of 0.4 percent during December

What the article fails to mention is that "the gain" was just us webmasters trying to find ourselves in Google's daily new index. ;)

[Ganceann]

All search measurements fail in one major aspect:

To identify legitimate searches.

Searches that should not be counted in terms of 'market share' are normally done by webmasters trying to find where they rank for several different terms.

This could account for quite a number of searches if each serps page is counted as a seperate query or contained within the same original query.

Added on top of this there are millions of automated queries - are these adequately discounted by those measuring the data? Likely not and therefore it is extremely hard to quantify.